


Systems Alert

by vmprsm



Series: LC Destin [2]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: "seriously though fuck that guy", Gen, Tech talk, The Finalizer, oh look the galaxy exists outside a warship, rate t for cursing and rude treatment of a soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-04
Updated: 2016-11-15
Packaged: 2018-08-28 22:33:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8465485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vmprsm/pseuds/vmprsm
Summary: Who the fuck is that guy anyways? I /just replaced those cooling lines/.





	1. bad luck one and two

The beginning of Skyler’s bad day started relatively tame, as all bad days normally do. The first sign was her favorite flavor of caf being mysteriously missing from the Aft B mess hall. She didn’t need caf with her exuberant nature, but it was the taste she liked. 

 

The second sign was her most trusted weapons engineer falling ill. He had said something, in a rushed comm, about vomiting and that was enough for her. She had to quickly reschedule the maintenance on the Deck H turbolasers to next week, which moved quite a lot of people around. It had eaten up her morning, and made her late to a meeting with General Hux’s aide to go over the results of the new cooling system. She had apologized profusely, and the aide seemed amenable, but the shame of it carried for hours after the meeting had concluded. 

 

Of course, bad luck comes in threes, just like deaths. 

 

Her datapad chirped with an incoming message. 

 

_ LC Destin- _

 

_ The fiberoptics line near the primary video feed room has gone offline. See to the repairs personally, as soon as possible. _

 

_ GH _

 

She sighed noisily through her nose, twisting around on her heels to go back down the way she came, the direction directly  _ opposite _ her quarters. There was absolutely no way to ignore a direct request from the General, and she should have taken it as a compliment, to receive a communication that asked her to utilize her skills. It showed trust, and she did appreciate it. But she was supposed to be coming off a twelve hour shift, and deeply would have appreciated a nap before handling his request. 

 

A pair of stormtroopers came around a corner, and she wiped the tired, vaguely annoyed look off her normally cheerful face. The cheerful look didn’t get her much more acceptance in the stern ranks of the First Order, but she preferred to be thought of as harmless. Plus, it was easier to be happy. 

 

As always, the place she needed to get to was halfway across the massive warship. She loved the  _ Finalizer _ , in a way that she was sure could not be recognized by most other officers, but sometimes she wouldn’t mind it being a tiny bit shorter. 

 

Reaching the video feed room, she snuck a glance inside. The functionality of the room was her only official concern, specialized officers were assigned to monitor the feeds and other officers were not generally allowed to see the feeds. The room had about a hundred screens that each took a division on the ship, flicking between a camera every fifteen seconds. With a couple blinks, she pulled her head back out before the custodians could notice her from the control room. 

 

It was difficult to find the source of the problem, and she spent a good hour pulling off panels from the hallway walls and frowning critically at the nearest cable room. The fiberoptics were a backup for the ILT system, and so even though it was down there were still intraship communications, however it acted as a check for the instantaneous system and having it down in any capacity was a weakness they could not abide by. Finally, after pulling out a panel near the floor, she saw the standby lights on a cable line were darkened, and she grinned. 

 

It didn’t matter much  _ why _ the line had gone dead, protocol called for the whole section to be replaced. There was a delicate balance between resourcefulness and optimal functionality, and it was a risk to try to repair the line. She set about pulling off the panels to the sides for several meters, until she could see the connection points. 

 

Skyler sat back on her haunches and sighed. Forethought, in terms of the little things, was not always her strongsuit, and it was with a sharp sting of irritation that she realized she hadn’t gotten new cable before tearing apart half the hallway. Grumbling angrily at herself, she set off to retrieve it.

 

As she made her way down three decks to the nearest supply room, she wondered why she didn’t just delegate this menial task to someone else. The General did say  _ personally _ , but he did also say  _ oversee. _ She technically could have passed the labor portion to someone else. It wasn’t that she was stubborn, but the fact was that if you wanted a job done right, especially one sent from the highest ranked officer on board, you did it yourself. That, and it would be a pain to yank someone off their schedule. She ran a tight ship, no pun intended, which didn’t leave much room for sudden additions. In the end, it was easiest to do it. 

 

She was fairly sure that this was sign three  and after dealing with what was turning into an extra shift, she could relax. She would be incorrect. 

 

Somehow,  _ somehow _ , she had managed to find a supply room that did not have enough cable to replace the length of the hallway. The technician held his hands up in a placating gesture as she rounded on him after futilely searching the shelves, eyes alight with frustration.

 

“Ma’am, I just contacted the supply room on Fore Deck K, they have confirmed there is enough cable in their supply. It is the next closest to your worksite.”

 

She sighed. She was doing a lot of that today. From her childhood, her parents had always told her to be a proper lady, to uphold the standards of the Core worlds by never cursing, never hitting others, and never breaking things. In short, if you could conceal your negative emotions, people would respect you more. She wasn’t so great at not hitting things when they  _ really _ made her mad (she had once broken a toe kicking the engine of her first speeder when it refused to run), but controlling words was easy, and she replaced all her negative vocalisations with sighs. 

 

“Thank you, I’ll head there now. Tell them I need thirty meters, please.” The technician relaxed marginally. ‘Please’ also got you a long way, even in the military. 

 

She set back off, once again walking the opposite way of where she wanted to be. The other supply room wasn’t too much further, but she would have to take a circuitous route back, lugging thirty meters of cable. Maybe she would grab a droid. No, droids were...unreliable.

 

The hallway got busier as she moved further towards the bow of the ship. She wasn’t such a terrible distance away from the second bridge, which was always staffed minimally in case of failure on the first bridge. She was also sidling closer to the primary flight deck, where rows of TIE fighters in all models and transport ships sat calmly in their ports, waiting to be needed. Small ships weren’t her forte, but in a pinch she could fix one. Anything on a small ship was on a big one, just in miniature form.

 

Skyler gasped and plastered herself to the wall as a trio of stormtroopers rounded a corner at a more than brisk pace, two in white and holding a man between them, and the third marching behind in chrome armor that shined almost painfully under the lights. Captain Phasma was an intimidating woman, and if she was walking with purpose, you got out of the way. Rank didn’t much matter when you had as many clearances and allowances as Phasma did. Skyler was pretty sure she was still a Captain only because that kept her under the radar from interested third parties. 

 

The man was surprisingly conscious, and even more surprisingly talking. He was babbling something about mixed coordinates and unlucky hyperspace exits, and the intricacies of trespassing, in a way that didn’t sound nervous, but rather like haggling. It wasn’t working, by the way the troopers were ignoring him.

 

As they got closer, Skyler raised her arm in a salute. They weren’t even in the same ranking system, and she was pretty sure she  _ outranked _ Phasma if they were. But again, you didn’t step on toes where you could help it. The man looked up from his stream of words toward the trooper on his left, and smiled like a fox when he saw her.

 

“ _ Oh _ finally, some curves that aren’t made of ceramic. Now _ that’s _ a hull design, lemme get a peek of that aft exhaust--”

 

“ _ Excuse _ me?” she blustered, unable to keep it in. Some officers would call that her Core world privilege. She called it not being a wimp.

 

“Whoa man, the Resistance would have been over yesterday if they put up a few posters of you sweetheart. Hey I think I spotted a smuggler near my belt, wanna come scout some asteroids for em?”

 

The stormtroopers hesitated at the anger on her face, and she took the opportunity. She separated from the wall, squared herself in front of the man, and slapped him hard across the face. His reaction was dramatic, head flying to the side and torso twisting so his opposite arm broke from the lessened grip of the shocked stormtrooper. The trooper regained it quickly, and the man recovered like nothing had happened.

 

“Thanks, love. Let’s do it again sometime.” He had the audacity to wink at her. She restrained herself from hitting him again as Phasma stepped around. 

 

“Lieutenant Commander,” she said, nodding. 

“Captain.” she replied, and stepped out of the way. Captain Phasma seemed entirely unruffled by her outburst, which justified it enough. They continued down the hall, the man calling out to other female officers along the way. Eventually he got the butt of a blaster to the stomach, and Skyler smirked. Served him right. 

 

The cable was not as heavy as she remembered, and quietly thanked her officers training as she plopped it down next to the opened wall panels. Dropping to her knees, she began the arduous process of pulling out the old cable, tie by tie. In an hour she had almost freed it from the wall, when her datapad beeped. It was the alarm beep of something malfunctioning, and she groaned. 

 

Swiping her passcode into the pad, several alarms hit her view at once. The most urgent was the first, flashing a startling orange with black font that read ‘Coolant leak on L’.

 

The next read ‘Turbocannon AL25 malfunction, liquid damage’. 

 

The one after  _ that _ read ‘Sensors offline, Aft L’ followed by a rapidly widening string of codes for various sensors in the walls for  _ all _ of L deck. Some were for the coolant line, obviously, others were for the ILT and fiber cable, some were for the camera feeds and air circulators. It was as if someone had gotten through the wall and wreaked havoc on the whole section. 

 

Skyler growled. There was a 90% chance this was Lord Ren, given prior reactions of her datapad to one of his rampages. She stalked down the hall to the video feed room and marched right in, barking “Hush,” at the technician as she tried to find the right screen. 

 

Centering on one near the bottom left, she said “Freeze this one onto this feed.” She technician scrambled to comply, and the screen did not jump when the rest did. 

  
The feed ran, and Skyler swore in a very unladylike way. In the air duct of deck L, rapidly scurrying to the port that let to deck M, was the very man she had just slapped.


	2. bad luck three

Watching in stunned silence, he passed various wire bundles and she saw his hands and feet flash out, and almost simultaneously the datapad in her hand pinged loudly. 

 

“Get me a duct droid,” she demanded. The technicians looked at her quizzically. “Now!”

 

They jumped into motion, and soon she had a new datapad with the controls pulled up for a duct droid. It whirred to life at the press of a button, waking up only meters away from the man’s current location. She navigated it down the duct until it bumped into his boot. 

 

He paused, and turned. “Oi, who’s this?”

 

She pressed the button for mic. “You are in quite a lot of trouble.”

 

“Who...are you...ya sound familiar, have I met you at a cantina before? Seen some smokin’ hot Twi’leks in the past few cycles.”

 

Skyler scoffed angrily. “No.” Her eyes refocused to his hand, approaching the droid with something clutched in it. “Hey! That’s my multitool!” 

 

He laughed. “Now I remember! The officer with the nice ports.” As he continued to reach out, she scooted the droid back. 

 

“You’re disgusting. Get out of my ducts, you’re ruining everything!”

 

“Disgusting, eh? Well, maybe I should wash off.” The cutting tool flicked out from the base of the tool, and before she could protest he cut a cooling line. 

 

Chaos reigned across the camera of the droid as the cooling line spat out not water but a highly concentrated cooling liquid, the very kind she had just installed last week. The intruder shouted, flailed, and eventually scrambled forward in an attempt to get away from the spray, covered in dripping yellow fluid. Skyler barely held in her laughter as she piloted the droid forward past the fluid, skirting close to the ceiling. 

 

“And this is why you should get out of my ducts, and turn yourself in like the horrible little rat you are.”

 

“Ouch, that hurts.” He put a mocking hand to his chest as he flicked wet hair from his eyes. 

 

The duct turn-off to his right slammed shut with an angry metallic clang. The emergency light just above it slowly glowed into life. “What’s going to hurt more is you starving to death when I close all the emergency hatches.”

 

“Really?”

 

“Really.”

 

Even though the somewhat gritty camera, she could see him smirk. “If you’re gonna try and kill me, you betta make that a promise, love.”

 

She growled and turned off the mic. “Out. Out now.”

 

The technicians looked at her with trepidation, and did not move.

 

“I am your superior officer and you  _ will get out now _ !”

 

As before, they jumped into action, leaving their seats and retreating to the small bunk room, the door sliding shut behind them. With a few well-chosen flicks on the holoscreen computer they’d vacated, she locked them in. No use letting them run off before she had this under control. And she  _ would _ have it under control. 

 

Skyler turned the mic back on. “Well,” she said sweetly, pouring on all the sugar of the Core worlds, “I suppose I’ll have to chase you out then.” 

 

A whirring came from behind the man, and another droid exited. It’s appendages,pushing out from a body that filled the duct space, were complex and painful-looking. 

 

“What is  _ that _ ?” He sputtered, losing his cool for a single moment. 

 

“Cleaning droid,” she replied, “better start moving.” 

 

The droid started its way down the ducts, and the arms began to spin and twist, whipping around as the scanned and scrubbed and scraped the duct walls. There was no way around it. 

 

His eyes widened. “Jakku’s armpit, she bloody well promised, looks like.” With a quick movement he swatted her little droid out of the air, and Skyler’s feed went blank. 

 

She screeched in frustration. As she scrambled around the pad’s menus to find another source of video, her personal pad pinged again. And again. 

 

Realization dawned, and she snatched it up, holding them side by side. He was still breaking things.  _ She could see where he was.  _ A few seconds delayed, of course, but her intuition kicked in to cover the gap. With a deftness born of a life spent tapping around on touchscreens, she began slamming shut safety hatches around him, blocking his way back without blocking the forward movement of the cleaning droid, and blocking his turns except for where she wanted him to go. “Straight towards the interrogation rooms with you,” she murmured, intent on the screen. 

 

Suddenly, the new alerts stopped. Skyler paused, looking at the spot on her blueprints that she saw him last. He had been turning a corner that would angle him up a shaft towards the fore end of K deck, and that much closer to where she wanted on G. The cleaning droid didn’t alert that it had hit anything, but she tried to turn on the cam anyways. She squinted, hoping to avoid seeing what might be the intruders innards plastered to the duct walls. 

 

Instead, she saw the wall. Just an expanse of silver filling the view. “What the…” She turned on another duct droid and fly it his way. 

 

The view was one that sent her gasping in anger. It was caught at the corner, halfway turned, and he had managed to get partly behind the droid She could see his hands fiddling in its operational panel with her multitool. He hadn’t seemed to have noticed the new droid, and was muttering to himself. 

 

“...’m gonna have to do the thing grandad always told me not to do.” His tone changed , becoming deeper, and he bobbed his head side to side as he spoke, “Oi, you little clanker of a progeny, you wanna see why they never cold start parallel ion engines? Let’s go pod racin’.”

 

There was a small shower of sparks that landed harmlessly on his bracer, and he scoffed, voice returned to normal, “Yeah alright grandpap, that only scarred me for life.”

 

She’d had enough. From the little droid she boomed “What are you doing!”

 

“Why, going to the hanga’, with my friend repurposed cleaning droid…” he glanced back at the panel, “seventy-seven.” As she watched, unable to interfere, he wiggled behind the droid and yanked it back to face forward. 

 

“You are getting nowhere  _ near _ a hangar-” 

 

Her words were lost as he started up the droid and it shot forward, slamming into the flying droid with its over-rotating arms and smashing it to bits. Skyler screamed wordlessly, angry beyond belief. This was  _ insane _ . 

 

Was she over her head? Would she be able to contain him? Who else knew the maintenance systems better than her? 

 

He’d said, in his strange, maybe Mid Rim accent,  _ hangar _ . 

 

Abandoning her active blueprint, she sent out an urgent message to the active Stormtrooper units on board.

 

_ Security breach, troopers report to all ship and hangar bay entrances. Secure all exits, hold all launches, standby for activity.  _

 

She didn’t sign it, but her security badge in the upper right hand corner of the message would be enough to get them where she wanted. She could explain to the troop captains later, but now she had to stop him from leaving. Because surely, if he could pilot in space and reroute a droid's system, he could steal a ship. With her tool, he  _ definitely  _ could. 

 

Managing to hack into the cam on her  _ own droid _ , it came online to show her the view of a hangar bay through vent slats. The hangar was empty, the doors shut. She opened the intercom into the room. 

 

“You are not getting out.”

 

His self-assured laugh sounded out, and the acoustics bounced it around the room. “Is that why I’m looking at all these bomber types? Through duct 15 in J5?”

 

Looking through the camera, a sense of panic zinged through her. She was looking at sf types in H2. “Liar!” Skyler spat, but the anxiety still pinched her lungs. His voice was in H2, but then how did he know about J5? 

 

“Heh, yeah, okay. You keep sayin’ that. Man, these cargo containers are roomier than I thought.”

 

“Kriff!” His tidbits weren’t giving her any assistance, there were cargo crates in almost every hangar bay, minus notably the two major ones that needed space to launch the trooper shuttles and other bulky ships. She shuddered to imagine him getting into any of the cargo. 

 

“Havin’ a hard time, darling?” 

 

Skyler bit back another curse, sending it up and down her hand instead. Of course she’d left the damn mic on. She cleared her throat to create an affected calm.

 

“Why do you think we won’t check every crate and ship before it leaves?” For good measure she closed all the ducts out of H2  _ and  _ J5, and checked the cams still flicking on the screens in front of her that  _ yes _ , there was a full troop in front of each entrance. The hangar doors that protected them from the void of space were shut tight. 

 

“Oo, I heard those. Getting antsy?”

 

“And leave my multitool out! I need that, you thief.”

 

He seemed to latch onto that, speaking quickly. “How about you gimme back my ship and we’ll talk about this omnitool.”

 

“That isn’t…” she took a breath, “I don’t have decision making power over that. Honestly, I didn’t much care if you were on this ship or not, though now I am leaning towards the distinct desire for you to be  _ off _ it. You have no idea how many lines and sensors I’ll have to replace because of you!”

 

“Hmm…” he paused, “yeah you do. You do because I don’t think you  _ want _ cargo sensor 357 to be vertically inverted.”

 

As she blinked in shock, trying to put the pieces of his wildly shifting thought process together, and he kept talking. 

 

“Man, have you ever seen a spice flattened on a ceiling? Pretty hard to piss of a Hutt but that’s a quick way to do it.”

 

Cargo alignment sensor...357? That was...she abandoned the droid cam and pulled up the master sensors chart, scrolling rapidly to the cargo sensors. 

 

“Anyways. Off topic. So, it’s keeping this fancy omnitool and figurin’ out exactly which crane will fling the next crate across the bay, may or may not be holding bombs, dunno, or my ship.”

 

She was hardly paying attention to his chatter. Sensor 357 should have been in the E hangar. She smiled wickedly. 

 

“Really, lady, you got like a milliona these things why do you need my old tub, huh? Oh,  _ that _ crate looks expensive.”

 

Sklyer’s eyes widened in a fresh wave of panic, sweeping away her sense of impending victory. Hangar E really  _ did _ have bombs in those crates. 

 

“Don’t! Do not. I cannot authorize your ship to be released. It’s impossible. I can only tell the General…” she heard the distinct beeping of a crane being moved across their connection, “oh hells, hold on!”

 

Reaching up a hand, Skyler tapped the comm in her ear, then very carefully made sure to turn  _ off _ the mic to the thief. “Anson?”

 

“Destin?” The voice on the other end was a male, soft spoken but firm. “What can I do for you?”

 

She sighed in relief. “Thank the stars. I need a piece of information, and after we disconnect, this conversation never happened.”

 

“Yes ma’am.”

 

The man’s voice spoke again, distracting her from her orders. “So, question of interest, do I throw the crate at one of your million TIEs, or the control center?”

 

“We do  _ not _ have a million TIEs, so don’t break one!”

 

“Seems like you have a lot, I’d be happy to crash test one for ya. Free.”

 

“No!”

 

“Really, just get some other lout to do it for you so he takes the fall, easy peasy.”

 

“Have you ever  _ been _ on a ship like this? Not how it works! So  _ hold on! _ ”

 

Switching off the mic again angrily, she tapped her comm again. “Anson?”

 

“Sky? Everything okay?”

 

“It will be.” She grumbled darkly. “Where is the ship we just pulled in that violated our space?”

 

“That thing? The YT? Let me look.”

 

“Welp!” Did this man never know when to shut up? “Looks like she ain’t playin holo with us, crane droid. Time fer your final mission.”

 

“You break even one of those crates and I open the airlock I swear!!”

 

“That would sure be rough for the droid. He’s just breezing through the TIE access codes. Or he’s hosing them down. Not sure if I overrode the archived commands or not.”

 

Letting out a short screech, Skyler punched the screen showing the droid in hangar E...hosing the opened cockpit of a TIE that looked distressed to be in such a state. The screen held fast against her assault, further fueling her rage.

 

“ _ Stay still!”  _ She yelled. 

 

“Ah, yep. Just...hosin’ it right down. Go shake some asteroid dust, lady.”

 

“You don’t even know where your ship is!”

 

There was a thoughtful pause on the other end of the line that had her digging her nails into the soft crease of her leg as she shifted her weight onto the same hip. “I’m narrowing it down,” he said cheerily, “see, my ship is  _ not _ in that hangar, only a very wet TIE.”

 

“If you keep breaking things…” she cast about for a threat, adrift in the tumultuous sea of her own incompetence regarding hostile negotiations. “I will send the battle droids in after you.”

 

“Yeah, do that thing again, send the droids.” He sounded highly amused.

 

“The troopers will eventually find you! I will shoot your ship  _ into space!! _ ” 

 

He snorted a laugh. “Troopers couldn’t find a droid on a jawa sand crawler. And that’d be dandy if you launched it for me, cause ya’ll weren’t dumb enough to put lockouts on the escape pods. If you did, it’d be wicked easy to fake a lockout.”

 

“Less ‘launch’ and more ‘shoot with lasers cannons until it happens to be outside the hangar’.” She growled. 

 

A hum came across the line. “You’re onea those ‘inside’ officers, aren’t you? Now unlock the hangar with my ship or I take a dump in one of these crates.”

 

Skyler sighed very noisily through her nose. She was still waiting on a response from Anson, who was mumbling quietly to himself in her comm. “Not your best threat yet, honestly. More like a step backwards. Did you find it then?”

 

“Mostly. And I’ve decided that easing down from such a... _ combative _ relationship would be mutually beneficial.”

 

There was a minute of silence as she dug five crescents into her leg, and then she heard the distinctive tinking sound of small metal items hitting the durasteel floor. She opened her mouth to speak, yell more likely, but he beat her to it. “Say, this isn’t Imperial standard issue. Naughty naughty, Miss Officer, eight out of ten. Non-reg toys for the top brass?” 

 

His mockery was about to be his end as she swiped angrily through her pad, looking for the battle droid locations, when Anson returned. “Okay, it’s in B. Looks like it hasn’t been clipped in yet. I’d hurry.” 

 

“You’re a blessing.” She told him, and broke their connection. “Thief?”

 

“I resent that, miss. And I have a lot of bolts to go.”

 

“Now  _ listen _ .” Her voice became deathly calm. “A sensor just went haywire near D hangar, which is certainly  _ not _ where a contingent of troopers are watching a junkheap ship in B hangar. They are now moving very quickly to D hangar to find a junkheap ship’s pilot.”

 

She heard him choke slightly, which lightened her heart immensely. He had been moving in a specific direction through the hangars, it had been easy to guess which he was likely in now. “And dammit, put down my multitool! You’ll rub all the oil right off it.” She said, irate.

 

She heard shuffling, most likely the asshole re-entering the ducts. “I’ll drop your little top-shelf toy in the sink outside B hangar. But there’s a lot of sinks, so I’ll beam you which one once I’m hitting light.”

 

“Oh a sink,” she grumbled, “lovely.”

 

“Now to patch these wires and…”

 

“Your wires I hope! Get off my damn ship!”

 

Destin quickly flipped two of the screens that covered most of the outside surveillance of the  _ Finalizer _ before she got two views of B hangar. In one she watched the doors open, the other pointed out into space. What could only be described as a junkheap careened away, the telltale signs of a man who is surely an idiot cold-starting his cruising engines sparking across the image. She knew, unfortunately, the ship sensors would see it as an asteroid spinning away from the ship, and she deeply, viciously, hoped he was vomiting. 

 

A message came through on her pad. How did he…? It read:  _ LAST SINK FROM THE LEFT, DECON ROOM FIVE _

 

She rolled her eyes as another message came through, right after the first.  _ STAY EASY ON THE EYES _

  
With a metallic slamming sound that reverberated through the room, the datapad screen cracked from one corner to the opposite and she stormed out. It would only take twenty minutes to delete all the records of their conversation from the ship archives, but she wanted her tool  _ now.  _ “I hope you hit a moon…” she muttered angrily, and two very surprised officers gave her a paused glance as she stomped by. 


End file.
